by James Wake
A wide rectangle of a machine rested on the table in front of her, a very fancy and very loud and very expensive printer. A window on its side showed her long strands of something black and shiny, which quickly dulled to matte flatness as it was stretched and dried.
“You said this would take hours,” Nadia said, entering the room.
“Just making sure the first batch comes out okay. This printer wasn’t really made for electroactive polymers.”
Nadia was sure she would agree, if she were aware of the specifics. Instead she shifted her eyes to a second printer, a bit smaller but still extravagantly costly. This one wove silver strands, gorgeous threads coming together into even more gorgeous cloth.
Such a shame it had to be treated with whatever that chemical was.
“I suppose it was silly to think you might have a box full of silkworms hidden back here,” Nadia said.
“Spiders.”
Nadia raised her nose—truth be told, she had assumed the silk was entirely synthetic. “Excuse me?”
“Genetically modified brown recluse, fed a special diet laced with carbon nanotubes and graphene compounds.”
Nadia pondered this for a tiny moment. “And they…what? Pull it out of the poor things?”
“The spider is sedated first, but yeah.”
She tried to picture that but wondered why she was doing so. “Fitting, I suppose. There’s quite an elegance to a spider’s web.”
“Have you ever seen a brown recluse web?” Tess said, laughing. “Those things are a mess. They’re the hobos of spiders.”
Nadia was sure she couldn’t identify a brown recluse out of a lineup, let alone its web. She and Tess watched the slow rhythm of the printer as it stretched black polymers into strands, then coiled them up like rope with a long cycling groan.
“Pretty clever idea, I’ll admit,” Tess said. She held up her prosthetic hand, flexing the fingers slowly, staring at the strands expanding and contracting. “I’m not excited for the next part, though. This stuff isn’t easy to work with.”
Nadia spotted small pads on Tess’s artificial fingertips that she’d never noticed before. Or never allowed herself to notice. Patches of slightly different black material on the ends of her metal digits.
“What are those on your fingertips?” Nadia said.
Tess looked surprised, lowering her feet to the floor and dropping her hand back into her lap. “Gripping compound similar to latex. Not as cool as your new gloves.”
Questions flooded Nadia’s mouth. She had no idea how Tess had designed her prosthetic, how long it had taken her, whether she’d chosen the color black or if that was merely its natural color.
Silence grew between them. It stretched on for ages, discomfort given almost physical form, as present and palpable as the droning of the printer.
“It’s very impressive,” Nadia finally managed.
“Huh? My arm?”
Nadia nodded, trying not to stare.
Tess raised her arm again, sliding the sleeve of her hoodie up a few inches and staring proudly at her handiwork. She bent her wrist back to an inhuman angle and spun her hand in a complete circle as she clenched and opened her fist.
Any other time, the display would have had Nadia rolling her eyes and trotting out some catty little witticism about skeleton arms being so last season. Perhaps it was meant to elicit such a reaction. It stood to reason, then, that reacting as such would be letting Tess win.
So many questions. What did that thing even feel like to Tess? Could she feel with it?
Nadia reached out to touch Tess’s arm, on the short exposed bit of prosthetic above her wrist. Tess jerked away at the motion, cradling her right arm with her flesh-and-blood hand.
“Sorry!” Nadia said, shrinking back. “I’m sorry. That was rude.”
“Yeah. Uh…yeah. Sorry,” Tess replied, just as confused.
“The material. It’s the same, is it not?” Nadia said, gesturing desperately at the printer.
“Uh, yeah. Yup.”
“Right.”
“Really tough to work with,” Tess said, clearing her throat and settling her arms in her lap as if nothing had happened. “That’s why it’s so rare, honestly. Complete bitch to automate weaving it into any kind of useful shape.”
“Thank goodness there’s only one of me then.”
“Ha! Yeah,” Tess said, “I don’t think the world could handle more than one of you.”
Again, no cutting response offered itself. Odd.
* * *
Sleep. At night. It should have been a rare luxury, the perfect way to spend her night off.
Jackson had gone days without sleep before. Weeks without more than a few hours at a time, cold and wounded and huddled in whatever wrecked piece of a building she could find for cover.
This was worse somehow. She lay back in her recliner, tossing a thin blanket onto her body—then off a few minutes later, then back on. Again and again and again. Tonight was an attempt at no medicine, an experiment to see if exhaustion could overpower the pain when it arrived.
Her fingers ripped tears in the blanket as her fists clenched tightly.
Crickets. Warm breeze out back. The ash tree. Barely remembered. Her headset lay smashed on the floor. Too slow and groggy to figure out how to click the audio over to her ear implants.
That fucking cat. The headset had a camera on it, of course, and if they’d found her at the gym, then they knew where she lived. Her headset had gone first, followed by every other camera and microphone on every other device she could find in her apartment. She’d even smashed a good part of her bathroom mirror before she finally found all of them; they were easy to miss among all the wires feeding the built-in displays in the glass.
Stupid anyway. Stupid little app that popped up on her mirror every time she brushed her teeth, reading her face and tossing ads up on the glass while she tried to get shit done.
A fresh spike of pain awoke in her arms. She popped the chair up and stared through blurry eyes at the remains of her apartment. The only thing not smashed to pieces—besides her chair—was her dresser, her mother’s gun safely on top.
That fucking cat.
“Cheshire?” she said out loud. The only microphone she couldn’t do anything about was the one implanted in the cartilage of her ear. That fact had hit her as she finished her rampage, her hands still bleeding from breaking apart the little microwave she kept near her closet.
Nothing in her ears.
“Answer me…fucking cat…”
Still nothing. Slick with cold sweat, she wiped her face with her palms. Months without a full night’s sleep, every day the pain creeping in more and more often.
She heard ringing in her ears.
Jackson bolted upright. An incoming call. With her headset in pieces, she had no way of seeing who it was, but she knew the gesture to answer it by heart.
“What do you want?” she said.
“Sergeant Alice Jackson,” a man’s voice said. A regular old man’s voice, not a nightmare chorus of computer-generated noise.
More important, she knew the man. Not by name, of course. Never by name.
“My apologies, former sergeant,” he said. “Were you expecting another call?”
“Sorry,” Jackson said, shaking out the swell of anger that had come growling up her throat. “Sorry, I uh…Why are you calling me this time of night?”
“You’re assigned to the night shift, aren’t you?”
Not good that he knew that. Not exactly surprising either.
“Have you thought about that opportunity we discussed?” he said.
“I’m not much for world travel these days.”
“That won’t be an issue. This assignment wouldn’t require you to leave the country. In fact, you wouldn’t even have to leave the city.”
That made her eyebrows pop up high. Plausible
deniability or not, federal agents operating here wouldn’t end well. “Is that supposed to pull me in? Because I gotta say, my answer just went from no to hell no.”
He snorted a quiet chuckle, the kind she’d heard many times from men who sent others off to get killed. “Your compensation would be—”
“I don’t care. I’m not killing anyone.”
“Is that what you think this is?” he said, not fooling her for a moment. “You won’t be operating with the Hellhounds. But Captain Dunn did speak very highly of your record.”
Did she now?
Jackson gritted her teeth to stop a long stream of profanity from spilling out. “The answer is no. The answer has always been no. The answer will always be no.”
She ended the call, her hand miming the motion of slamming a phone down. Maybe this time they‘d finally take the hint.
Not likely. She shook her head and went back to wiping her face as the pain crept back in. She was done with the army, done with being a soldier, done with killing. They could dangle as much money as they wanted in front of her. It didn’t matter.
Her hands wouldn’t leave her face. She doubled over in her chair, sitting alone in the darkness, holding her shaking head until the sun rose.
* * *
Late. Nadia rubbed her tired eyes, only stopping for a second. She’d been at it for days now, painstakingly weaving the polymer strands into a thin sleeve, layer after layer, finger blisters wearing themselves open and raw. Diagrams of female musculature loomed on the screen above her: pretty young women with their skin flayed off, posing all the same.
Another layer completed. She drew a sealer down its length—a small tool like a crimper. The smell of ozone crept into her nostrils as the strands fused into a solid band of artificial muscle.
A low, grating snore resounded behind her. She glanced at Tess, asleep on the futon, mouth wide open, a trickle of drool shining from the corner of her lip.
Nadia felt less tired in that moment.
An idea occurred. It seemed risky. Unnecessary really. But it was very persistent all the same. It took Nadia several long minutes of sitting, biting her lip, and making no progress on her work to finally get up and get on with it.
She stood up to throw a blanket over the girl sleeping there, to tuck her in for the night. Or late morning. Whatever time it was.
That was all. Certainly not to hover next to the futon for several long seconds, holding a blanket and staring. Tess’s right arm was dangling over the side of futon, sleeve dragged up, her artificial fingers reaching toward the floor.
Exactly like the strands Nadia had been weaving for hours now. One hand crept out, floating closer and closer toward the artificial muscle of Tess’s forearm.
No. That was…rude, at the very least. Uncalled for. Selfish. Biting her lip again, she pulled her errant hand back. She knew what the strands felt like anyway.
Another low snore buzzed out of Tess. She was on her side, saliva leaking out into a dark stain on the futon exactly where Nadia had placed her own pillow many times. Although she wanted to gag at the sight of it, she fought to ignore that observation. Instead she took head-shaking pleasure in the way Tess’s hair was tangled up, a twisted mess falling over her slack face.
There was simply no way that could be comfortable. Before she could think about it, her hand snuck up and swept the errant locks back. Scratchy. Clearly her friend wasn’t using the right kind of conditioner—if she used conditioner at all. Clearly Nadia would have to work a bit harder, tuck a few more strands behind her ear.
“Mmmmm, muh…huh?” Tess said, stirring, her eyes still closed.
Nadia was already clear across the office, scolding herself with every step. The blanket was still bunched up in her hands, useless now.
* * *
Through it all, practice.
Nadia threw three quick strikes, thudding into the foam armor covering Brutus. Her breath was calm and measured, her stance solid. Much better tonight.
Before all this, she’d never hit anyone in her life. Sure, a slap here or there, an exclamation point at the end of a relationship or two.
But nothing serious.
Not like this.
It felt good. That rush of a punch hitting home, the solid smack of the front of her elbow sweeping in and knocking him backwards, knocking a man much larger than herself back a few paces. It was no wonder to her anymore why some people would want to fight.
Dancers in the mirror, sweeping their legs high, graceful and perfect. Herself in the mirror, much less well dressed but swinging her leg up high and snapping her bare heel into Brutus’s ribs. The big man took it all with a wide smile.
She couldn’t help smiling back, seeing her face masked in the mirror now, eyes lit up. It felt beautiful sometimes. She threw another punch…
Sometimes it didn’t feel beautiful. Her wrist turning a fraction of an inch the wrong way, her fist stopped pathetically on the foam and rebounded all that force right up through her joints.
Tape and wrap. Like the dancers, on point even as their feet bled, Nadia kept training. Aleksa demonstrated a quick takedown, dodging a strike from Brutus that looked twice as nasty as the one he’d split Nadia’s brow with months ago. In a flash of graceful movement, Brutus was flat on his face with Aleksa holding his wrist, her heel dug into his shoulder.
She made it look so easy.
Nadia failed spectacularly. She dodged then lunged into the takedown, missing Brutus’s arm and falling on her face. She tried again, grabbing his arm then utterly missing everything else. He tossed her to the floor for her effort. Still smiling. Still encouraging.
Again. And again. And again.
An hour later, she moved without thinking, felt it flow perfectly, felt her body make the motions on its own until one final sweep had her slamming Brutus to the floor, her knees on his back and one hand on the back of his head.
It made her jump to her feet, fists raised high like a prizefighter. Valery barely reacted, only saying one word, simple and calm.
“Again.”
And “Again.”
And “Again.”
* * *
It was just like wearing her much-beloved yoga pants.
Nadia ran her hands down her new tights, slim black strands of banded muscle fiber that matched her new sleeves. So much better than the rig in every possible way.
“Okay, test range of motion?” Tess said.
Gladly. Nadia’s right leg shot up to slap at her extended arm, harder and faster than she’d been ready for. She had expected awkward motion, halting little improvements. Growing pains. She hadn’t expected it to fit like a long-missed second skin.
Better than her human muscles even. She still had aches in her legs—pleasant aches but aches all the same—leftover from her latest heist a few nights before. Or from La Garrud lessons. Probably both, melding into constant general soreness.
That only made stretching it out feel all the better. Nadia bent over, planting her hands firmly on the floor to stretch her back and rear in a very compromising yoga pose she remembered from long ago.
“I’d say range of motion is quite satisfactory,” Nadia said.
“Uh-huh. Yup,” Tess said.
Something odd about her tone. Nadia raised her head, breathing in deeply and satisfyingly through her nose. Out through the mouth, slow and controlled. “How much of the polymer is left? I’d like to put some strands through the torso area as well.”
“Sure,” Tess said.
Still stretching, Nadia looked over. Tess was openly staring at her, her fingers completely still. Her mouth even hung open a little.
“I’ve been thinking about getting both my legs cut off,” Nadia said. “Might be fun, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Mmhmm,” Tess said, nodding. Still staring.
“Tess!”
That snapped her out of it. Her pupils fl
ickered, no doubt playing back the last few moments of conversation, trying to catch up.
“See anything you like?” Nadia said.
Tess slammed the hood of her sweater over her head and pulled it down tightly over her eyes. “I was just…checking the uh…”
“You were staring,” Nadia said, getting up and stalking over to her. “Were your eyes recording? Saving that pose for later, hmm?”
“Oh my god, Nadia!” Tess yelped, pulling her hood down tighter until her face was completely covered. “Just test the slippers, okay?”
“What’s wrong?” Nadia pouted and crossed her arms with a truly unnecessary cocking of her hips. “Are you saying you don’t find me attractive?”
“Ugh, this is the worst. You’re the worst,” Tess said, shaking her still covered head. “Test the slippers!”
Delightful, watching her partner squirm like this. Such a lovely day already. Nadia crouched—a slight bend of her knees—then shot up to stick the palms of her hands to the ceiling. A straight vertical jump of about ten feet, easy as breathing. Her legs swung up, the soles of her feet sticking as easily as her palms.
She hung upside down, her hair forming a curtain around her face. Each of her arms was wrapped in a woven sleeve of dark fibers, with grouped bands like muscles clearly visible.
A goofy smile crept out. She really couldn’t help it. There was a bit of a trick to actually getting her new shoes to release, a certain way of lifting her foot. Slight twist, and…there.
Nadia took a step, carefully leaving one ceiling tile behind and sticking her foot to the next, making sure to center her weight on the strut between tiles. She couldn’t stop moving her arms, waving them around to relish the feeling. They felt a little tight maybe. But she felt their strength, coiled and waiting, tensed and thrilling. They looked just as good, the weave flexing with her perfectly. Naturally. Almost as lovely as Tess’s arm.
“And you were giving me crap about wanting both my arms done?” Tess said. She was peeking out now, her hood still cinched tight around her face.
Nadia looked up, at her own feet. The boots truly were more like slippers, thick socks with the big toe set apart and the rest of her toes grouped together. “Why did you shape them like that?”
